Individual or several printed products, e.g. small groups of printed products, are, according to the prior art, packed for dispatch purposes, in that in a more or less continuous method they are enveloped with a wrapper, which is generally narrower than a printed product, but can also be of the same width as the latter. The printed products may, for the above purpose, be enveloped generally on all sides with a sheet which is e.g. welded, or they may be inserted in envelopes.
Different packing methods differ as a function of the nature of the pack to be used and therefore as a function of the effective protection offered by the pack to the printed product. Generally, a more complex method leads to a pack offering a better protection.
It is common among all the known methods that the products have to be individualized or singled and in part must even be stopped, i.e. the printed products must be supplied in a flow, in which they are e.g. conveyed parallel to a pair of edges such that the distance between the corresponding edges at right angles to the conveying direction of two adjacent products is at least as large as the extension of the products in the conveying direction. Such flows permit capacities of 8,000 to 12,000 copies per hour, but do not make it possible to achieve the presently required large capacities of up to 40,000 copies per hour. In order to achieve such a high capacity with the known methods, they would have to be performed in plurality and in parallel, which would lead to a correspondingly high apparatus expenditure.